Josh Barro Profile picture
4 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
I'll have more later this week on what so many of us (and especially me) got wrong but I think one of the big matters is that Democrats never understood or grappled with why Trump had such positive ratings on the economy, both pre- and post-COVID.
Partly economic performance is just a fact on the ground that still affects you as a challenger even if you acknowledge it. But liberals underestimate how strong the GOP message of "a private economy that works for you" is and Trump was presiding over such an economy in 2018-19.
Then in '20, household finances held up shockingly well in such a terrible crash, in large part due to bipartisan CARES Act and Fed action. Views of the economy held up much better than you'd expect from the headline numbers.
So in that context, I should have been more surprised that Trump wasn't polling better.

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More from @jbarro

6 Nov
I see lots of you retweeting that insane thread from @pegobry. I’m disappointed, and you need to get a grip.
Of that looooooong thread, this is the only one that addresses any remotely specific claim of what fraud there might have been. And this is irrelevant! Biden is going to win PA by a clear margin before any late-arriving ballots are counted.
The conspiracy theory doesn’t make any sense. I was at a polling place all Tuesday. You’re gonna do this in front of dozens of people? Or by mail, each ballot has to attach to a registered voter. We saw in NC-9 how hard it is to get away with stealing mail votes on a small scale.
Read 5 tweets
5 Nov
In heavily Hispanic Lawrence, MA, Trump lost 74-25, an improvement from 82-15 last time. Another sign of Trump making inroads in Hispanic communities even as he continues to lose them overall.
Lawrence is 80% Hispanic or Latino
Significant improvement also on the south coast (New Bedford/Fall River) where there is a large Portuguese-American community.
Read 6 tweets
5 Nov
Lots of people who just witnessed a huge polling error are currently tweeting their analyses of the results based on exit polls that haven’t even been re-weighted to the result yet. We don’t know what share of white women voted for Trump or anything else of that sort.
It’s going to be months until we have good demographic data like this. Hold your takes.
There are things we can infer from precinct data — go ahead and say “Trump greatly improved his performance with Florida Cubans” — but precise numbers will have to wait.
Read 4 tweets
2 Nov
So here’s what I don’t get about all the Florida analyses. They focus so heavily on turnout rather than persuasion. And outside the Miami area, we’re seeing these district level polls showing persuasion is providing big gains for Biden. Does he even need to improve turnout?
For example, here’s Biden up 14 points in a central Florida district that Clinton won by 4. Obviously the same turnout as 2016 here would not produce the same result as 2016. stpetepolls.org/files/StPetePo…
Obviously there are some countervailing losses for Biden among Cuban voters. But white seniors are a much larger chunk of the Florida electorate than Cubans.
Read 4 tweets
31 Oct
Wait, they hired Ruth Shalit to write this??
And then let her use a different byline??
And then she made shit up (no double question mark on that one, it’s not a surprise)
Read 5 tweets
16 Oct
I've been thinking more about the president's still-pretty-strong poll numbers on the economy, and they make even more sense to me than they did already just from the usual observation that the economy was good pre-COVID and voters think he's a business guy.
I suggest you think about it this way: Are there aspects of the president's economic performance you approve of? I can make a pretty long list of economic choices Trump has made that I approve of -- big ones, not just little ones.
What has Trump done right? He made good appointments to the Fed, including Jay Powell. (He then started making bad choices but Congress blocked those.) He also has been right about monetary policy, pushing for lower rates at a time when lower rates were appropriate.
Read 7 tweets

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